Unless otherwise specified, the descriptions of sources in this section are extracted from Pierre-Etienne Will and collaborators,Official Handbooks and Anthologies of Imperial China: A Descriptive and Critical Bibliography (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

Rem.: In his preface Lang Jinqi insists that the Xiyuan lu is not easy to use for post-mortems (jianyan) without risking errors: this is what he found out during a thirty-year career with many difficult cases to solve. The insufficiencies and contradictions of the Xiyuan lu are particularly in evidence as far as the human skeleton is concerned. The plates representing the skeleton and bones that make up the present work were created by the author together with his colleagues and private secretaries and are intended as a complement to the Xiyuan lu text. Parallel to the plates, two wooden dummies representing the 365 parts of the human body were made, one of the [external] body (litt. the corpse, shi 屍) and one of the bones (gu 骨), and were stored at the prefecture of Guilin (Guangxi). The Jianyan jizheng (q.v.) was appended to the hecan as a repository of examples of difficult cases. [phtc. en entier]Ed.: Undated manuscript ed